An essay published in "Europe and America: Between Drift and New Order", Alton Frye and Werner Weidenfeld (editors). New York: Bertelsmann Foundation and Council on Foreign Relations, 1993.

I.

It strikes me that "The Future of
the Transatlantic Relationship" has quite a considerable past. Long
before the East European revolutions of 1989, this imagined future had
been endlessly ruminated in monographs and essay collections, in quarterly
journals and on "talking heads" television programs and, of
course, in multi-day conferences bringing together learned men and women.
There can be no mystery to this: for near half a century, the "transatlantic
relationship" has been both anomalous and crucial, and thus has always
managed to draw the attention of those who by their natures find the mix
of anomalousness and importance irresistible. The resulting attempts to
mitigate that anomalousness, in theory and in policy, trace the history
of the "transatlantic relationship" ITom the founding of NATO
itself to the decision to emplace intermediate range missiles in Europe.
Our ways of thinking about the United States and Europe are deeply imbued
with this history; it is hardly surprising that our very categories of
thought, no matter how forcefully we struggle to adapt them to the future,
turn stubbornly back toward a more accustomed past.

Sometimes the greatest obstacle to building anything new is clearing
away the rubble. The central task of our Euro-American Strategy Group,
in my opinion, should be to devise ways to clear the ground, to avoid
devoting our time and effort to constructing yet another series of papers
exploring, however nobly, the usual issues: the security relationship,
the financial relationship, the matter of trade, and on and on. That we
automatically organize our thoughts in this fashion seems to me only the
most readily apparent sign of how tightly the past holds us in its grip.
That we should make a strong attempt to surmount this past is necessary,
I think, not only because those papers have been written many times before,
but because the underlying issues have changed, in ways that - though
we are ready and eager to acknowledge, even to assert the fact of change
- we have scarcely begun to plumb. It is, in fact, precisely those ways
in which the issues have changed that this project should attempt to discover.

Writing three decades ago about "the structure of scientific revolutions,"
Thomas S. Kuhn pointed out that during those rare times of revolution
in world view he called "paradigm changes," the central concepts
underlaying the old order become emptied of meaning and untranslatable
to the new. "[A]t times of revolution," wrote Kuhn, "when
the normal scientific tradition changes, the scientist's perception of
his environment must be re-educated - in some familiar situations he must
learn to see a new gestalt. After he has done so the world of his research
will seem, here and there, incommensurable with the one he inhabited before..."

In my view, the task of "re-educating" our own perceptions
must come first, the necessary precursor to constructing a new agenda
for the "transatlantic relationship." Designing the means by
which such a re-education can be effected, I believe, should be the first
goal of our Euro- American Strategy Group.

II.

How to do it? This, of course, is a much
more difficult question. I put forward a few, very hesitant suggestions,
keeping in mind the need to define issues in new terms and, perhaps, to
attack them with new methods. I do so acknowledging that these suggestions
remain rather vague, and that in undertaking to use them to guide our
study we will be, to some extent, floundering about in the dark, with
no assurance that in the end we will be able to lay hold of any definitive
answers. Still, in my view, this is unavoidable if the goal is really
to redefine the problem, and to seek new and profitable means to approach
it.

I would like to see, for one, attention
paid to the issue of "the movement of peoples." I mean by this
not simply an accounting of the flows of refugees and illegal workers,
though both of those matters are obviously of great importance, but a
look at the question of how the populations in the countries carrying
on "the transatlantic relationship" have changed since the early
postwar era and, more important, how they are changing still. A thoroughgoing
exploration of this would touch not only on the pressure felt, both in
Europe and the United States, from the people of what has come to be called
"the South," but on the question of what defines and what will
continue to define the Transatlantic World itself.

How to go about looking at this issue, or rather, this cluster of issues?
Obviously, it is partly amenable to familiar social scientific methods
- to creative demographic and economic analysis, for example _ and such
analysis might well form the bedrock of a more interdisciplinary study.
The key question, though, is exactly how to go about building on this
bedrock - how, that is, to carry the analysis from the evidence of demographic
changes to the impact of such changes on cultural and political forms
within the transatlantic societies. Some of these effects appear obvious,
of course, and have been the subject of much comment: the so-called guestworker
issue in Europe and its links to the rise of "non-mainstream"
political parties; or the increasing "Latinization" of many
American cities, and the repercussions of this on some aspects of U.S.
foreign policy.

Key here, again, is the need to develop
an effective lens through which to view the larger questions. My very
tentative suggestions point not so much at what to do but what not to
do: Don't limit the discussion to the contributions of the social scientists,
or to the customary methods of summarizing evidence. Don't exclude documentary
film or videotape as a more economical and pointed method of addressing
the issue than the standard five-thousand word essay. Don't exclude methods
that examine mass communications, for example, or popular entertainment,
as a means to study how the cultures of the transatlantic nations and
their constituent peoples are changing. Indeed, "mass culture"
itself is another term that comes to mind when I think of the future of
the transatlantic relationship - mass culture as a symptom of change,
as a sign of the future. I would like to devise a way for the project
to examine television in Europe and North America, whether televised entertainment
or, perhaps, televised information, such as television news. This might
offer a way to see how the transatlantic relationship is popularly conceived
and pictured, day to day - how our largest mirrors reflect back to us
our unexamined preconceptions.

A second cluster of issues, obviously related quite closely to the first,
is the so-called "return of history" (or, in some cases, the
strongly promoted impression of such a return). Nationalism in southeastern
Europe, leading to the unfortunately named "ethnic cleansing"
there, is the most obvious example, and one can think of similar, if less
brutal instances on the horizon slightly to the north. More interesting,
though, is the manner in which historic rivalries and antipathies, and
the newly opened questions of national borders, have brought out from
the shadows the historically distinct interests of the European Community
nations, and divided their interests from those of an increasingly perplexed
United States. This is highlighted, once again, in the case of the former
Yugoslavia _ Germany's ill-fated initiative in favor of recognizing the
independence of the republics, for example - but it is a phenomenon that
might well reappear.

A third cluster of issues centers on "borders and sovereignty,"
matters, again, quite obviously related to some of the others I've mentioned.
I'm seeking a means to address the ways in which the notion of sovereignty
is changing in Europe and North America - the idea would be to attempt
to go beyond the issues raised by the European Community's current troubles
and to try to examine broader trends that reflect changes in the degree
of control exercised by the nation state over its peoples and its wealth.
Evidently, these trends touch on trade, immigration, capital flows, environmental
and consumer regulation, and so on; the challenge lies in bringing these
together and analyzing how they will affect the transatlantic relationship
in the future. Finally, there is the matter in many of the key countries
of the transatlantic relationship of "the exhaustion of democracy."
The weary cynicism and contempt for the familiar politicians, pervasive
in the attitudes of many of the European publics as they contemplate their
generally too long-lived governments, mirrors the quite extraordinary
rise of an American third-party movement last summer, and the shadow of
that movement's continuing importance in Washington. With the abrupt collapse
in 1989 of "the other" - the "anti-self' beyond the Iron
Curtain against which the West could positively judge itself - a case
can be made that the transatlantic world may be moving, however slowly,
in the direction of different political forms.

III.

Many of these vague remarks may seem to do little more than lead us
away from familiar categories without providing anything even nearly fully
formed to take their places or, in some cases, to cloak familiar categories
in more contemporary, "soft focus" disguise - to offer new terms
in place of new thoughts. To all counts I plead no /0 contendre, offering
in mitigation only the excuse that I have sought not to offer an agenda
but to prepare a field fertile for discussion, a field in which the boundaries
must be, by necessity, indistinctly drawn.

How, for example, might our group take up the cluster of issues I've
christened, somewhat grandiosely, "the exhaustion of democracy"?
We are dealing here in the realm of comparative politics, seizing on a
striking and unprecedented phenomenon that, as I write - in the wake of
the July 1993 G-7 economic summit - has become impossible for any serious
political observer to ignore. As the elected leaders of the major industrial
democracies met in Tokyo, all found themselves in deep - in some cases,
unprecedented - political trouble at home. The long serving German Chancellor
and French President, and the more recently installed (though at the head
of a no less long-lived ruling party) British Prime Minister, had in common
approval ratings that had dropped to, or near, historic lows. Only days
before the meeting, Canada's Prime Minister, who had become the most unpopular
leader in his country's history, had been supplanted at the head of his
party. In Italy and Japan, meantime, matters were considerably worse,
for the problem had gone far beyond the political weakness of a particular
leader; in both countries, political systems that had governed for four
decades and more were succumbing to historic scandal and turmoil, with
no clear sign of what might appear to take their places.

To all this, the exception might appear
to have been found in the United States, where a new President and new
party had taken power fewer than six months before. And yet in many ways
the situation in the United States was the most striking and perplexing
of all. For, only a few months into its four year term, the young Democratic
Administration had found itself in severe political trouble. By April,
President Bill Clinton's popularity had dropped below thirty-six percent
in several national polls - which meant that roughly only one American
in three approved of how the new President was doing his job. Not only
did this constitute the lowest rating on record for a President at this
point in his term - a moment which fell, after all, in what was traditionally
still the "honey moon" period for a new incumbent. It also represented,
after the national euphoria that had accompanied Clinton's inauguration
a few months before, an astonishingly swift collapse, on the part of the
citizenry, of political faith in the man they had elected.

It is not my purpose here to delve into the immediate political causes
of this collapse but rather to suggest that the Clinton Administration's
troubles are a symptom of a larger phenomenon that may well have significant
repercussions for the "transatlantic relationship." For I believe
that despite the press's preoccupation with "two-hundred dollar haircuts"
and "gays in the military," Clinton's political plunge has more
to do with a general exhaustion in American politics that in its broad
outlines and its implications, bears some similarities to the more dramatic
crises in Italy and Japan. I have called this the "Exhaustion of
Democracy," though in truth "Exhaustion with the System"
might be a more appropriate title. To look at its roots in the United
States we must go back beyond President Clinton's early troubles, back
to the election of November 1992 and the months leading up to it.

The most remarkable single fact about the election of 1992 is not that
it marked the end of twelve years of Republican executive ascendancy but
that its winner managed to attract only forty three percent of the votes
cast: the lowest winning percentage in an American presidential election
in well over half a century. This astonishingly low number can be described
to an astonishing phenomenon: that of a man virtually unknown to the broader
electorate six months before the election emerging ITom nowhere, without
benefit of political party or Congressional allies, to attract nineteen
percent of the vote. Ross Perot's abrupt apotheosis in 1992, and his continuing
presence as a pivotal factor in American politics, is the single clearest
affirmation of the politics of exhaustion in the United States.

Perot's dramatic rise in popularity was made possible by the simple
fact that "Perotism" existed as a political movement long before
most Americans had heard of Perot. Perot is only the current personification
of a movement that came to prominence as early as 1978, with the "Proposition
13" anti-property tax movement in California, and that was embodied,
two years later, in the Reagan "supply-side revolution." That
movement is middle class, predominantly Southwestern and Western, suburban
and rural, anti-elite, antigovernment, anti-tax. If in 1980 many in the
movement were willing to believe, with Reagan, that the way to cut government
was to "cut off its allowance" through massive tax cuts, these
same voters have emerged ITom the decade, and the enormous Federal deficits
that it brought, bitter about government and deeply pessimistic about
the possibility of reforming it. They see government, and the Federal
government in particular, as something that 'Just doesn't work."

Thanks to Perot, the budget deficit has become the symbol of this general
breakdown - which is why American political observers were to witness,
in 1992, the strange spectacle of those very voters who had proved to
be most resolutely anti-tax for a decade and more, flocking to a maverick
candidate who promised quite forthrightly to raise their taxes an unprecedented
amount. Perot put himself forward as someone who could "get under
the hood and Get it done!" He stood for action. The strength of his
appeal lay in the profundity of the vacuum he was striving to fill. In
that vacuum could be found contempt for government and those who governed,
cynicism about the ability of government to solve problems, despair about
the functioning of the political system itself. These feelings, of course,
are by no means new to American politics. What is new, I would argue,
is their current strength and their encapsulation in the program of one
man who has not only placed himself outside the traditional two-party
structure but who personally commands the wherewithal to take advantage
of the powerful new communication technologies that make an "anti-elite"
campaign more plausible than ever before.

Perot, however, js not the point. More
important is the way that the feelings he epitomizes - cynicism, impatience,
alienation, political disgust - have come to dominate American politics.
These feelings, and the erosion they have effected in the system, partly
account, I think, for Clinton's precipitous slide (together with his own
self-engineered pratfalls), and they should stand as a warning of what
may be to come when the Administration tries to take on enormously complicated
issues - issues that the government, even in the best economic and political
weather, would have difficulty mastering. The deficit, a product of a
true clash of interests and, secondarily, political ideologies, is the
most obvious of these; but health care reform is another, and so might
be - particularly with Perot's loud stance against it - the North American
Free Trade Agreement. The present Administration's willingness to confront
these issues is admirable; but it has remarkably little political capital
on which to draw, and a perceived failure on ~y of them - particularly
on an issue like health care, as personal and sensitive a matter as government
touches - could be politically devastating, leaving in its wake a deeply
wounded Administration and a paralyzed government.

IV.

What has all this to do with the transatlantic relationship? The American
government, after all, is not paralyzed by scandal, like that ofltaly;
nor is its most powerful party splitting down the seams, like that of
Japan. I would argue, however, that the United States is suffering from
a deep crisis of faith, and the fact remains that faith - faith in democratic
institutions but, above all, faith in a national mission - has always
animated American foreign policy.
It is strangely easy to forget, when discussing the "transatlantic
relationship," that the term (as traditionally defined) really describes
something that endured less than half a century - half a man's lifetime.
America was firmly brought back to Europe only by the beginnings of the
Cold War, and by a brilliant political effort on the part of the country's
leaders, notably President Harry S. Truman and Secretaries of State George
C. Marshall and Dean Acheson. The Truman Doctrine is a peculiarly American
document, for it has about it a tone of mission, almost of zealotry; of
American exceptionalism: the worldwide mission it envisages for the United
States is couched in deeply moral terms, as the protection and advancement
of freedom - "that it must be the policy of the United states to
support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed
minorities or by outside pressures... that we must assist free peoples
to work out their own destinies in their own way."
It was this very messianistic strain that led many prominent diplomatic
thinkers, from George Kennan to Walter Lippmann to disapprove of the Truman
Doctrine. They felt that the voting of aid to Greece and Turkey (the issue
that occasioned the Doctrine) should be presented to the country narrowly
and pragmatically, as exactly that the need to aid certain countries that
were under specific Communist threat - not as part of some universal anti-
Communist mission. It is important to realize that this moral streak,
this presenting of the United States as the leader of a universal crusade
for freedom and against tyranny, had its roots in domestic necessity -
that is, in the felt need to justify the enormous broadening of American
global responsibilities in moral terms and thereby enlist the support
of the citizenry for a worldwide role unprecedented in the country's history.

The requirement of a moral necessity, the need to justify American action
abroad in easily comprehended ethical terms, has persisted throughout
the postwar period. Witness the rhetorical scrambling the Bush Administration
found itself forced into when it was struggling to build support during
the months preceding the Gulf War: Secretary of State James A. Baker's
homely remark that the effort against Iraq was about "jobs, jobs,
jobs" proved an embarrassing political failure. Only when President
Bush seized on the mission of standing up to a repressive tyrant, one
who was "worse than Hitler," did the Administration have significant
success in convincing Americans that war was necessary. When the moral
justification begins to fray, as it did, most prominently, during the
Vietnam War, so too does domestic political support.

For American foreign policy, the problem
today is not that the mandarins have produced no new "Long Telegram,"
no new doctrine to replace containment as the animating global strategy;
it is that our leaders have failed to enunciate any moral mission that
can replace the anti-Communist struggle as a justification for American
action in the world. Into this vacuum has rushed a de facto rationale
of timid self-interest, a rationale that, as we have seen in the Clinton
Administration's confusion over the war in Bosnia, begins to look painfully
like the cynical calculus that Americans commonly attribute to the Europeans
(particularly to the French). The politically weakened Clinton Administration's
contradictory statements about Bosnia last spring, the moral grandstanding
and the vacillation and ignominious backtracking that followed, set alongside
the terrifying and moving scenes of carnage Americans were watching on
their television screen each evening, have been deeply corrosive of any
claim the government has to moral leadership in foreign affairs. It is
corrosive, that is, of the very notion of a strong interventionist role
for America in the world.

Since the end of the Cold War, the American people have been asking,
in effect, Who are we? What is our role in the world? What are our responsibilities
as a nation? When we see tremendous suffering and carnage on the screen,
as we do from Bosnia, are we obliged to do something to stop it? So far,
they have had no answer. George Bush, notwithstanding his role as leader
of the effort in the Gulf, did not have the predilection, nor the rhetorical
talents, to provide one. Bill Clinton, though he frequently couched his
foreign policy positions in strong moral terms during the campaign, has
repudiated virtually all of them since his inauguration. Even if he had
been inclined to intervene forcefully in Bosnia - as he once appeared
to be - Clinton's political weakness has banished from his agenda any
notion of strong action in the Balkans.

To guide them in their thinking about their country's role in the world,
Americans are left with little more than fragments: bits of history (the
United States' traditional role in Central America, for example); shreds
of ideology (the country's stated support of human rights and democracy);
here and there a piece of tactical advice (Secretary Warren Christopher's
proviso that any American intervention abroad must envision an "exit
strategy"); and a pinch of humanitarian sentiment (the effort in
Somalia) - all mixed together with the confused and violent postwar world
they see depicted nightly on CNN. To this stew may well be added - in
the event, say, of a bloody conquest of Sarajevo - substantial resentment
of and contempt for our European allies, who might be forced to reassume,
with the rhetorical assistance of mortified American officials, their
late 1930's role as duplicitous weak sisters constitutionally unable to
stand up to tyranny and addicted to appeasement and other low forms of
diplomatic double-dealing.

Whatever this may be, I doubt it is a recipe
for strong American support for a revitalized transatlantic relationship.
The transatlantic relationship as we know it was built by confident leaders
who put forward a convincing, farseeing vision of what America's postwar
role would be and who were able to describe in vivid terms why it must
be that way. These men were, in the best sense, "elites," and
they benefitted from a trust and a respect of a sort that seems now, in
our incalculably more cynical age, forever consigned to history.

The movement of which Perot is currently the personification, on the
other hand, is proudly populist and defiantly anti-elite - witness Perot's
resentful assault on the North American Free Trade Agreement and, more
intriguing, his angry criticism of the Gulf War as a product of State
Department malfeasance. When it comes to foreign affairs, resentment (in
the manner of "it's about time our allies have to start paying their
own way!") appears to be his motivating emotion. He and his supporters
have no inherent love for, and a good deal of suspicion of, NATO and the
other classic institutions of the postwar world. His influence is likely
to remain strong. For the transatlantic relationship, it is unlikely to
be a positive one. These are but a few of the lines of thought that might
be drwan from the cluster of issues I have called "The Exhaustion
of Democracy." They are at most a starting-point. Our task is to
build on this startingpoint, to flesh out these issues and devise ways
and methods to study their implications. In this way we might begin to
clear the ground, "reeducate" our own perceptions and thereby
confront the challenge of the paradigm change in transatlantic relations.